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Shocking SASCOC!!!

October 13, 2010 at 12:46 pm

It is with truly great dismay that I read over the weekend that SASCOC is satisfied with the team’s performances and results in Delhi. The Commonwealth Games are concluding and South Africa is slowly slipping into sporting oblivion. Not through lack of effort from the athletes there but through the lack of vision, strategy and foresight from SASCOC. We are finishing with fewer medals than the previous CWG, and we are only really winning medals in swimming and para-sports. Minor nations are catching up to us at a rapid rate and with the lack of exposure given to our young athletes we will be in for even worse in 2014.

SASCOC has no system in place that guarantees that South Africa will produce top sportspeople by 2014 or beyond. In South Africa we think you buy a million rands worth of soccer balls dump them in a township and that you are then going to get a million soccer players back who can play international soccer. It is time for everyone at SASCOC to either resign or to start getting with the program. Petty politics and politicians running sport at SASCOC are to blame for this dismal performance. SASCOC need to start implementing a system similar to the British, Australian or Indian systems, systems that are based on high performance, international success and accountability. We should once and for all stop throwing money at grassroots development and building multi-million rand facilities.

To get the desired results at the Olympics, CWG etc. we need two things: 1.) A Talent pool that is on par with the best in the world. 2.) The best coaches coaching the best athletes. We have number one, in fact we have one of the richest talent pools in the World, across all races, and for all sports. We have a sport mad country and culture. This you cannot buy, develop or import. We have it; many, many other countries do not. Where we completely loose the plot is at number 2. We want to compete with countries that employ hordes of the best coaches around. Most of these countries have hundreds or thousands of full time coaches that coach their top athletes. Where does a nation like Britain put the majority of the government money in? Grassroots? Facilities? No, their top athletes and their top coaches. Answer this! Who wins you a medal at the Olympics? A 7 year old kid or an international athlete? Obviously not the 7 year old, so why spend money on him then? Britain have a great philosophy that goes, you do not have to spend money on grassroots, if you have international athletes who perform well enough to inspire the youth to take up the sport. Why do so many kids want to play rugby, cricket or soccer in South Africa? They all want to be Bryan Habana, Hasiem Amla or Steven Pienaar. You do not have to spend millions on them to take up the sport anyway. It did not take millions to get them to be the best in the world, they had the will, talent and good professional coaching.

The British also further says that the federation (UK Sport SASCOC for that matter) must make sure that no international level athlete has any excuse when they go into competition, everything must be taken care of, because if the athlete then fails it is his or her fault and they have no excuse. SASCOC does the opposite. They support not a single coach in South Africa and a handful of athletes. Not one coach who had an athlete that was in Delhi can call themselves a full-time professional coach. How many athletes can financially do nothing else than work to becoming the best in the world? One, maybe two. So all the athletes there had an excuse, SASCOC.

The good news is that it can be turned around. India has shown it. They have dramatically improved their medal tally; almost doubled it in fact in four years. If SASCOC realizes what sport is all about and what has to be done we can do the same. That will unfortunately only happen when government stop appointing politicians to run sport, and I am not sure when that will ever happen.

We should in all honesty be satisfied with a hundred medals at the Commonwealth Games; we should be up there with Australia and England, and not Mr. Sam, pat ourselves on the back that we did not to worse than last time.

I was listening to Geraldine Pillay during the athletics showing on tv and it was just going back to grassroots all the time. What we should do IMHO is to take the IAAF Youth and Junior rankings of the past 4 years and develop that pool of athletes first – if they are still in athletics – and their coaches as well. If you do a little reseach you will find that we have brilliant youth and junior athletes, all very well placed in the world, but look at the seniors rankings. Australia have youth and junior development squads, they are developing athletes with POTENTIAL. Why cant we do the same here? Yes, we have to go to every corner of our country, but kids needs heros! Take Geraldine as an example: she became a hero in the western cape and influenced a lot of less privelage girls to do sprints/athletics. That is what we need, and I just hope that somebody at ASA will do something to restore Athletics to its former glory.